3 Things Literacy Coaches Can Do to Set Teachers Up for Success, ep. 250

3 Things Literacy Coaches Can Do to Set Teachers Up for Success, ep. 250, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Hey, Coach, if you’ve been waiting for the confident literacy coach course to open up, your wait is almost over. The course is opening soon, and I want you to be the first to know make sure you’ve signed up at confident literacy coach.com to be included on the wait list. You’ll be notified as soon as it opens for enrollment. This year is going to be even better than before. I’ve updated the reading and writing modules to provide you with the knowledge. You need to support your school in implementing practices that are proven to build skilled readers and writers. Get the PD. You need to provide the PD and learning. They need join the wait list so you can join the course.

Chrissy Beltran  00:37

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissie Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  01:03

Hey coach and welcome to episode 250 of instructional coaching with Miss B. I just realized that we are now recording episode 250 that is wild guys.

Chrissy Beltran  01:14

Anyway, this episode is called three things literacy coaches can do to set their teachers up for success. And I wanted to this episode to come out kind of early in the year, because these are things that if you can do them this early in this first semester, it can make such a difference in the work that you do with teachers all year long. This is part of my series on instruction and lessons, and I really think it’s going to be valuable to you. I cannot wait to share it. These are actually some ideas that I have taken from my course that is now open for you. The Confident literacy coach course is open at confident literacy coach.com, so you can go grab the course and be prepared for your year of literacy coaching. It walks you through all the practices that you need to know in alignment with the science of reading. It walks you through the things you need to do to define your role and set yourself up for success. And working with individual teachers and teams of teachers, I know you’re going to love it. It’s going to really support you all year long. And I can’t wait to share these three tips that I’ve taken from that course. Now these are just three individual things out of so many lessons. Okay, this is like small little tips that are a piece of the course, there’s so much more information in there, but the first one that I have for you is something that I did with my teachers as an elementary school teacher. Now these this is going to be more relevant to elementary although aligning the resources that you have access to is valuable in any grade. But specifically, if you’re working with teachers who either teach literacy or even if they teach content areas, this is a great way to create a basket of resources for them as mentor texts, and you can also use it for building background knowledge. So these are kind of two separate ways to do the same kind of thing. So here’s how it works. If you do mentor text baskets, which is something that I’ve done with schools, teachers in each grade have a basket of books, okay? And every teacher has access to the basket, so they each have their own little basket, okay? And it’s focused on mentor author. So what you do is you identify a mentor author for each grade level, and you get a collection of that author’s books for each teacher to have in their rooms. Now, whenever I did this, I’ve done it with schools that had many bilingual sections. So in each school, about half the classrooms are bilingual classrooms, which means in certain grades, instruction is taught here in Spanish, because bilingual here pretty much means English and Spanish. So they’re Dual Language classrooms that have model where kids are instructed largely in Spanish early on, and then over time, they diminish Spanish. They do not maintain both in the schools that I’ve worked in. However, the schools my kids go to, they maintain both. So in the upper elementary grades, you would still need to have mentor texts in both languages in the schools that I’ve worked in we only did this in primary grades, maybe pre K through second. So that really limited our choices, because we had to find books that were available in different languages. And the way I got around that is I actually did a lot of ordering on, directly from Amazon and directly from even eBay. If I only needed maybe three copies of a book, I would hunt them down, used online, and then I would get reimbursed by the school, and they couldn’t reimburse tax. That was my gift, I guess, to the school, right? Because I wanted my dual language teachers to have access to everything that my monolingual teachers had. And that was not always the case, at least in this case, I could do it. So I chose authors specifically because they had books available in different languages, and I was able to find the books for other teachers. I really did a lot of thinking about the author for each grade level. And I actually have a blog post on this. It is an old one. The formatting is probably wacky, but you can check it out if you head to buzzingwood McPhee do com and search for mentor text baskets. I think that that post will pop up there. Author, and I give the mentor author that I use for each grade level, and I tried to include for each grade level a mentor author in more of a narrative style fiction and more of an informational, expository type style like nonfiction. And that way they had two different sets of books within their basket that they can use to plan together. So the idea is we sat together early in the year, and I use the strategy called the book pass. That’s a free download you can grab, and I’ll link it in the show notes if you want to check it out. Head to buzzing with Miss b.com/episode 250 the book pass is a really fun strategy where people can explore books and think about how they might be useful to them in their own classrooms. So then each each teacher you know, or each table, you have a table with your teachers, and you put their book basket on the table. You just give them one basket with all the books in it, and then they get to pass the books around. You spend maybe two minutes looking at each book, or five minutes, depending on how many books, how many teachers, and they have a little sticky notes, and they get to record, maybe mentor text or mentor lessons that they could use, really good anchor lessons that they could use that text to teach. So then, as the year goes on and you are teaching those, those different topics, they have ideas in the book of the of the different lessons that you could teach. And you can actually kind of word process that for them, it’s an old term. You could type it up, and you can give them a little table so that as you teach those different skills, they know what mentor text would be great for teaching that that’s already in their basket. You could even include that little list you create together in each basket as a copy for the teacher, and laminate it as just kind of a starting point. It’s so helpful because everybody has a set for planning. And if you’re trying to align the planning teachers are doing, that’s one thing you can align the planning around. Is what mentor techs are using. I also kept a set of the books in my PLC room whenever I would work with teachers and facilitate those sessions, because that way I would be able to, like, you know, reference the books, and they all didn’t have to bring a copy first of all, which is kind of a hassle. So then I have a copy there for everybody to kind of browse through if they want to take a look during the planning. And we can really be specific with our planning. And that was super helpful if you don’t want to focus it on mentor text mentor authors to teach specific skills or strategies during reading and writing. You can use these book baskets to build background knowledge by having a collection of books for each grade. So basically, what you would do is you would focus on specific areas of content in different grades, and the social studies and science standards are really good place to start. I know so many schools have invented invested in completely separate curriculums for knowledge building. My daughter’s school has one, and she loved it. She loves the knowledge portion of the day. Personally, I don’t understand why we’re not building knowledge around the standards we’ve already decided were important in each grade level, and I haven’t had that explained to me quite yet, but, and maybe there’s a really great reason for it, but I I really believe if we want teachers to teach their content areas, we have to give them the tools they need to teach them. And why not invest in what we want them to teach if we want them to teach communities in third grade? And some of the important people that they are learning about are Helen Keller. It’s always Helen Keller. And you know, other other you know maybe Martin Luther King, Jr, is always in third grade. If we know this is important to us, get on the books, get them what they need, guys. So I feel like if we can build these baskets of books that are aligned to the standards we want teachers to teach, we can use them as background knowledge building opportunities, because we know how important background knowledge is to reading comprehension and also to writing ability. What do you have to write about if you have no background knowledge, right? So if we think about what we want kids to know by the end of each grade, hint, it’s probably in your standards already. Think about what you want them to master, the essential things they really need to walk away with, and then purchase book sets in different genres for each main set of knowledge that you’re trying to get kids to walk away with. What a great use of our resources, and how much easier will it be for teachers to integrate and say, We’re teaching this in social studies. We’re going to read this a lot during reading and practice these strategies with it that we already were going to teach, and now it’s all aligned. Think about how fun that will be to plan. Okay, so that’s my first tip, is align your resources through mentor text baskets or background knowledge baskets of books.

Chrissy Beltran  01:14

My second tip for you is for any grade level, and this is align rubrics and have regular writing reviews where you examine student student writing samples. So this is what I recommend that you do start with aligned rubrics for your grade level that include the components of skilled writing. And in the course, I actually give you a sample of the rubric that I have created and used for teachers for years. You want to make sure that you’re including essential pieces. Maybe you use the six traits. Maybe you use a state rubric that you’ve kind of devolved to make it more kid appropriate and kid friendly. Either way, you want to focus on main components. Probably. Between three and five. Sometimes, you know, obviously six traits has six. Sometimes they have six plus one, you know, with a presentation. And so you can align your rubrics as a team, make sure everybody is on board. And then you can practice analyzing student writing with them to calibrate. And there’s so many benefits of this. Okay, here’s what it can look like. You’ll teach writing in different genres according to your scope and sequence, right? You teach writing as usual, but you’re going to create writing benchmarks and common assessments, or common assessments, and have teachers review the writing together, and it grows their capacity exponentially the conversations you can have when everyone is looking at the same kind of writing and everyone is looking at the same rubric, are amazing. It builds teacher writing language. It builds teacher writing knowledge. It helps calibrate them and say, Wow, I didn’t know third graders could write like that. I have not. My seventh graders are not writing like that. What did you do to get your kids writing like that, and you can have those conversations across classrooms that do so much to support teachers in their learning in writing. Writing is an area that so many teachers struggle in, and a lot of it is because we don’t give them the support that they need in writing. Sometimes we teach them how to write with a specific structure, right? I remember when I was a new teacher. I had right from the beginning, training right from the beginning. The only decent piece of it is it helped teachers really analyze for structure and understand that they should be looking at that right beyond that, it was not great. I did not enjoy it. I did not enjoy teaching that way. It just gave me a better handle on structure, and we don’t need to invest bazillions of dollars in writing training that is just going to teach them structure. There’s so much more. And yes, I know they have many lessons, blah, blah, it was not a good program. You can come at me, that’s fine. I don’t I’m not shaking, I’m not moving on that one. So instead, we want to grow teacher knowledge about writing, and we can do this by elevating the language in the room, by participating in these conversations and really talking about, you know, structure and and fitness, fluency and voice and language use and intent and purpose. So many amazing things you can talk about if everybody is there to look at student writing together so that one schedule it in. We used to do one about once a semester, or no once, once every we did four year. We did a beginning of year. We did like a mid first semester. We did

Chrissy Beltran  12:34

a little bit towards maybe a couple weeks after we came back for the second semester, and then we did one again at the end of the year, to really talk about how things went, what growth we saw throughout the year, and then what we could do next year. We also kept just a spreadsheet with all the kids names on it, obviously, and then their writing score that they had we scored each of their pieces throughout the year so we could see if there was some kind of improvement overall. You can also give a copy of the rubric to each teacher for each piece, and they can staple it, and they can mark on the rubric exactly why they selected those specific reasons for scoring. What they scored.

Chrissy Beltran  13:07

My last tip, I’m only doing three. It’s a short episode, but that might be helpful to you in this busy time of year, is create a video bank. Now we have talked about this in different contexts throughout the year. I’ve talked throughout the years, I’ve talked to a couple of different amazing organizations that do this. DiGiCo is one. Sydney is another. And I have a really fantastic episode about video coaching with Corey camp. That’s a great one again. Check the show notes out if you want to see it at buzzing with my feet. Com slash episode 250 the idea of a video bank is you’re creating almost exemplar it doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but they’re models, right? And so you are building a bank of videos that teachers can go through to learn how to teach something or to get ideas for teaching something. I feel like we miss out on so much of the human capital that we have at schools. You’ve got some great teaching going on at your school. I can guarantee it. Somebody’s doing something great, and we miss it, because everybody’s teaching in their own little rooms, and they close the doors and everybody’s in their classrooms, and that’s just how teaching is. Right? We have got to get people into other rooms if we want them to grow. The easiest way to do this is with the magic of technology. We are living in a time where we do not have to physically put another person in another person’s room. If we can’t do it, we can use a camera. So I know that sounds really obvious, but build a bank, a safe bank in a safe location, right? It shouldn’t just be like on Facebook or whatever. Can’t do that where every time you model a lesson, you record it and then you tag it with the things that somebody might want to watch it for. Maybe they want to see it because it’s a student engagement strategy. Maybe they want to see it for the specific strategy they used. Maybe that you used, maybe you want to they they want to see it because of the text that you use. Or what the skill was that you were teaching. You can tag it here, right and put it in the bank. You can do Google Drive. But that’s not super secure. Um, you would have to have approval from your teachers and maybe not get the kids. It just depends on how, how your security works in your district and what people assigned. You have to ask, you know the important people at the central office to get approval for that. If not, you can use a secure location like Sydney, and then organize it by the practice featured, or the component that you’re teaching kids, or whatever, and enlist great teachers at your school to also make good videos. So you can say, Hey, I know you’re teaching such and such this week. Can I come by and record you for like, seven minutes short? Is better. We don’t. People are not going to sit there and watch a 90 minute video of you teaching an entire literacy blog. Instead, just focus on one specific thing, and that way you can sort the videos better as well, because it’ll be more focused. People know exactly what they’re looking for. So if you have a video bank, think about the possibilities. You can use it for PLC meetings to show teachers, hey, we’re coming up on this unit on fractions. And, oh, well, I guess this is an episode about literacy, but you know, it’s still true and, and this is one way that so and so did equivalent fractions last year in her classroom. You can use it for professional development to differentiate PD. And so instead of everybody learning the same exact thing, you could say, Okay, I want you to go through the videos that are in this section and explore them to get a couple ideas about what you can do in this topic, and that way you can differentiate by grade level or topic or subject. You can also use it for onboarding new teachers. New teachers need to see it. They just need to see it. And you may not have all the time in the world to spend in their classroom. So instead of feeling like you’re just leaving them to flounder and struggle, show them, give them a video bank. I whenever I started teaching, I had a teacher that I worked with, and we had this massive science curriculum. They were called FOSS kits. I don’t know if you remember them. They were those black and white boxes that look like composition book, you know, print on the outside, massive and super cool, hands on stuff. But we ended up teaching like, three standards all year because they were just so in depth and not super realistic for the amount of standards that we had in science in Texas, and they weren’t all even aligned to our standards. Anyways, the issue was that it was a lot, and if you were not comfortable with science, like maybe you didn’t pay a whole lot of attention in college, or you just never felt good about it, right? A lot of people never feel good about it, then you might not have enough background knowledge to really see what those lessons could look like. You might have some trouble envisioning them. They were very in depth. And so this teacher that I started teaching with she was a new teacher at the same time as me. She would watch every single one of the videos included in those kits. She would take the VHS, yes, I said, VHS. And she would take it home and watch it on her her TV, and she would learn all the things that she needed to learn, and she would take her notes, and then she would go back and teach her lesson, and having that with a lifesaver for her. So just think about how many people will really use these things that they want to do a great job, and they just don’t know what it looks like. You can support them with independent tools. If you create a video bank, I would love to hear if you do it, I think I know that I’ve worked on one before, but we didn’t get as far as I would have liked. You know, it takes real time and investment, and so if you do and you use this at your school, I would love to hear about it. This that three tips that I have for you, the mentor text baskets, or background knowledge baskets, aligning writing rubrics and having writing reviews throughout the year to build teacher knowledge and skill and video banks. Next week, we are continuing our little mini series about instruction, and so I’m talking with Eva Medeiros about three processes that support student learning but are often overlooked. I cannot wait to share that episode with you. I also really hope to see you in the course. The confidentliteracy coach.com is ready to go, and you can join me there, and until next week, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  19:05

Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIB and check out the podcast show notes. Happy. Coaching!